Summary

Description

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines are a very foundational and fundamental resource in Cloud Computing. Deploying virtual machines gives you more flexibility and control over your cloud infrastructure and services, however, it also means you have more responsibility to maintain and configure these resources. This course gives you an overview of why use virtual machines as well as how to create, configure, and monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager.

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines: What You'll Learn

Lesson

What you'll learn

Overview

Overview of the course and the Learning Objectives

What is a Virtual Machine?

Understand what are Azure Virtual Machines and what workloads are ideal for VMs

Creating and Connecting to Azure VMs

Learn to deploy Windows and Linux VMs as well as how to connect to these VMs

Understand the basic concepts of Desired State Configuration and the options available to Azure VMs

Design and Implement VM Storage

Gain an understanding of the underlying Storage options available to VMs as well as Encryption

Configure Monitoring & Alerts for Azure VMs

Learn to monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager as well as configure alerts.

Summary

Course summary and conclusion

Transcript

We’ve created and configured VMs as well as connect to them. But it’s worth knowing the different states of Azure VMs. If you recall when we created our VMs, after they were up and running they were in a state called “Running.” However, when creating a VM you will notice the “Status” of the VM is in a state called “Creating.” But typically VMs will either be in a “Running” state or “Stopped” state. The “Running” state quite obviously means the VM is up and running at which point you may connect to the VM. And of course you are being billed per minute for the VM while it’s running.

However the Stopped state actually has two states: “Stopped” and “Stopped (Deallocated).” Let’s log into our Windows VM and simply issue a shutdown as we would an on-premises machine. This will close our RDP session automatically. Let’s take a look at our two virtual machines and their Status. As you can see our VM is now “Stopped.” However, though the VM is Stopped, the VM still has a hold on certain physical resources in the Azure datacenter and thus still incur a cost similar to that of a “Running” VM. To truly free the resources used by a VM, you must issue a Stop from the portal.

Let’s go to our Running Linux VM and issue a Stop from the portal. You’ll notice a blue ribbon that says “Deallocating”. Now you see a state of “Stopped (deallocated).” Deallocated means it’s no longer using hardware resources and thus does not incur a cost. Let’s be sure to fully stop our Azure VM that’s currently in the “Stopped” state. Let’s navigate to the Windows VM. In the “Overview” we can see an orange ribbon that warns you that the VM is still incurring compute charges. Let’s click “Stop.” And there we go, our VM has now moved to a “Stop (deallocated)” state.

If I want to reconnect to one of my Azure VMs, I simply click the “Start” button which changes it to a status that says “Updating” followed by “Starting” and finally it reaches a “Running” state at which point we can now connect to the VM and we get a Portal notification staying that our VM successfully started. If there are any problem starting the VM, or if VM provisioning failed you will notice the VM will be in a “Failed” state and we will also get a Portal notification stating the VM “Failed”.

About the Author

Chris has over 15 years of experience working with top IT Enterprise businesses. Having worked at Google helping to launch Gmail, YouTube, Maps and more and most recently at Microsoft working directly with Microsoft Azure for both Commercial and Public Sectors, Chris brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the team in architecting complex solutions and advanced troubleshooting techniques. He holds several Microsoft Certifications including Azure Certifications.

In his spare time, Chris enjoys movies, gaming, outdoor activities, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.